With the majority of television programming still broadcasted in standard definition, perhaps the best source of HD content today is from a Blu-ray Disc or HD DVD player. The two warring high-definition formats know that this holiday season will be critical in their fight, and are now launching their offensives.

Backers of Blu-ray Disc this week held what it called the “Blu-ray Festival” in hopes to win over the minds of print and online journalists, according to HomeMedia Magazine. The media event occurred alongside the new Blu-ray Disc marketing campaign, which now carries the tagline, “I Do Blu.” With today’s release of Spider-Man 3, and the upcoming releases of Cars, Ratatouille, Pirates of the Caribbean and the Die Hard movies, Blu-ray Disc hopes to have a record season.

Although the release of Transformers on HD DVD sold quickly enough to set records, the Blu-ray Disc camp was quick to rain on that parade. Given to attendees of the event was a fact sheet showing that Blu-ray Disc sales during the week of October 16 managed to out sell the rival format. The sheet also lists sales of Blu-ray Disc accounting for 61 percent of all high-definition disc sales.

Blu-ray Disc-exclusive studio 20th Century Fox’s president Mike Dunn spoke out against rival studio Paramount for “taking the bait” in its decision to release high-definition movies exclusively on HD DVD. Dunn also suggested that a certain large, HD DVD-backing corporation is purposely confusing the high-definition battle in hopes that consumers will go the way of digital downloads.

The report believes that Dunn was referring to Microsoft when he blasted “the orchestrated campaigns of confusion and anti-consumerism fueled by an 800-pound gorilla that would prefer to force us all into the practice of paying tolls for the right to exchange information and enjoy entertainment.”

The average consumer is actually unaware of either of the two new formats. They understand that DVDs are the disks and that VHS is the tape, and that DVD is better. He/she buys their disks from Walmart (the #1 DVD seller BTW) and is happy if it works.

They represent of wide swath of America and all of them are 100% not interested in having to buy all their favorite movies all over again. They just got finished switching from VHS to DVD and are most thrilled right now with those $1 per day DVD rental machines at McDonalds and Walmart.

quote: They represent of wide swath of America and all of them are 100% not interested in having to buy all their favorite movies all over again.

This one arguement against HD always befuddles me. Why would anyone who buys a blu-ray or hd-dvd player be required to buy all their movies again? You DO know that a blu-ray or hd-dvd player can play regular dvd just fine right?

....right?

if they feel like they want to buy some of their favorites AFTER watching some movies in HD and decided that it's worth the upgrade, how would that be bad?

I hate to say it but they are.... Take my older brother (man I remember the days when he was ahead of the curve on me with tech)... He honestly doesn't even know there is a format war on... His girlfriend got a 50" plasma HD-TV that which displays 1080P (they didn't know the display res). They bought a DVD upconvert dvd player with integrated 5.1 surround (panisonic I think) and thought that since it used HDMI it was an HD-DVD player (the sales person told them so as well, go figure). So my brother wanting to watch an HD-DVD decides to go to blockbuster to rent a move on "hd-dvd blueray", A). not realizing that there is no such thing as "hd-dvd blueray", they're different formats and B). that his dvd player doesn't do either (as far as I know there's no integrated 5.1 hd-dvd/bd player on the market even).

So unfortunetly the customer has no idea... They need to be informed (if they decide to go hd-dvd/bd I'll inform them and recommend hd-dvd at this time). Anyway, sad but true that people don't know the difference these days :(